Image, imagination and the social imaginary: Solo improvisational dances of North Africa and the Middle East
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The solo improvisational dances of North Africa and the Middle East became part of popular discourse following Napoleon’s conquering of Egypt. Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and other visual artists painted images depicting the dancers. Gustave Flaubert (1821–80) and others penned narratives of encounters with dancers. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) wrote his play Salome (1893). Sol Bloom created the street scenes of dancers for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Hollywood turned out countless ‘blood, sex and sand films’ by stars such as Rudolph Valentino (1895–1926). These images created in the nineteenth and early twentieth century became fixed in the popular imagination and dictated the conception of the dances of North Africa and the Middle East, and ultimately the ethos of the region itself. This article considers the impact these images have had on what Arjun Appadurai refers to as the social imaginary. By extension, it examines the impact of the imagination created within the vocabulary of the dances on the dialogue between North Africa and the Middle East, and the global community, including those who trace their lineage to this area and those who do not.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".